This invention relates to a phantom for simulating the electric load constituted by an object to be examined for an RF coil of a magnetic resonance apparatus, comprising a loop which can be inductively coupled to the RF coil and in which a predetermined electric resistance is included.
Examples of such a phantom (object simulator) are described in The British Journal of Radiology, 59, pages 1031-1034. One feasible embodiment of the phantom is a ring-shaped vessel filled with, for example, a saline solution. It is a drawback of such a container that it is bulky, heavy and vulnerable. Another solution disclosed in the cited article consists of a closed loop which can be inductively coupled to the RF coil and which comprises, for example, a coil, a resistor and a capacitor. This solution is comparatively expensive, the more so because the resistor and the capacitor should preferably be variable so as to enable adaptation of the phantom to various circumstances.